Banks, asset managers and tech vendors back new standard for software interoperability
More than 20 high-profile banks, asset managers and software companies have joined forces to establish the Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium, a group that will promote standards to help traders move between programs on their desktops.
FDC3 hopes to make moving between programs a more seamless experience. Forget cut and paste: the group imagines a desktop system that will make it as easy to move between programs as it is on your smartphone.
"Today, the humans sitting at desktops are the integration layer between their applications," commented Mazy Dar, the chief executive officer of OpenFin, the company that spearheaded this initiative. "We believe the time has come to enable financial desktops with the same app interoperability that we take for granted on our iOS and Android devices."
"FDC3 will give us on the desktop what FIX gave us for server side interoperability between venues and clients."
The group includes several large asset managers, banks and inter-dealer brokers that are heavy users of trading technology, including AllianceBernstein, Barclays, BGC Partners, BNP Paribas, Citadel, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, RBC, TP ICAP, and Wellington Management.
The group also includes a mix of technology providers, with several relatively young fintech companies such as Algomi, ChartIQ, Cloud9, GreenKey, OpenDoor, RSRCHXchange and Trumid alongside more established vendors such as FactSet, Fidessa and IHS Markit.
The financial industry uses thousands of desktop applications for trading, market data, order management, analytics and various other functions. These applications are difficult or impossible to connect to one another, so users are required to continuously re-key information. This hampers productivity and creates operational risk. The FDC3 initiative hopes to solve this problem by creating common software and standards across industry applications.
“If you think about your mobile phone today, you have lots of different apps on it, and if you have your calendar and it has your address, you can click on that and go to Google Maps and find your home,” said Adam Toms, OpenFin's CEO for Europe. Financial services applications, in contrast, sit very separately on the desktop. Generally, firms either have to add some custom programming to integrate systems or the users themselves must copy data between programs.
“Communicating and sharing context between multiple apps without the huge overhead of bespoke integration will be a massive boost to productivity for both the development community and ultimately our salespeople and traders to get more done,” Bhupesh Vora, managing director, markets technology at Barclays, said in a statement when the group was announced. "FDC3 will give us on the desktop what FIX gave us for server side interoperability between venues and clients."
The new program will be built on open source technology contributed by OpenFin, which has developed an operating system that already adds interoperability to the desktops of over 400 buy-side and sell-side firms. OpenFin's system, which is based on the HTML5 standard for web pages, works with every operating system to make web apps run like native desktop apps.
OpenFin was founded in 2010 and has gained acceptance among banks, trading firms and asset managers as a framework for integrating applications in trading environments. In February 2017, OpenFin raised $15 million in funding from a group of investors including J.P. Morgan, DRW and Euclid Opportunities, the venture funding arm of NEX Group.
